What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source/self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use?
I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small script to parse your logs. I did something along these lines to parse Caddy logs to get some idea of how many people visit a link. That's really all I needed and the great part is that I run it whenever I want an update, so it's not consuming resources constantly. The logs are cleared and the output is saved before logs are cleared so I know Article 1 had 39 views (or less!) and Article 2 had 5 views and so on...
So I think we're overdoing it and we would benefit from taking a few minutes before going down the rabbit hole of analyzing EVERYTHING.
I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small script to parse your logs. I did something along these lines to parse Caddy logs to get some idea of how many people visit a link. That's really all I needed and the great part is that I run it whenever I want an update, so it's not consuming resources constantly. The logs are cleared and the output is saved before logs are cleared so I know Article 1 had 39 views (or less!) and Article 2 had 5 views and so on...
So I think we're overdoing it and we would benefit from taking a few minutes before going down the rabbit hole of analyzing EVERYTHING.